In 1990, the Deep Dish TV series, ...will be televised: Video Documents From Asia, curated and produced by Shu Lea Cheang, intended to reverse the usual flow of communication from America to the other, lesser-heard side of the globe, from "the developing countries to the developed metropolis." The series is one of the earliest creative video projects in Hong Kong art history.

It’s funny to look back only five years at the first YouTube video, "Me at the Zoo" (2005) by the site’s co-founder Jawed Karim, and consider Andy Warhol’s clichéd "15 minutes" in light of the Internet, YouTube, and 21st-century video art. As misguided as the concept unfortunately may be, fame is no longer relative to time and has rooted itself in participation, sharing, and community.

Earlier this year I was invited by SAW Video to do research into their Public Domain project, in which seven artists were given access to copyright-free material (not limited to, but including film footage) from the collection of Library and Archives Canada in order to make new single-channel videos.

As a consequence of their ease of use and mass popularity, Internet platforms have become the preeminent domain of collective authorship. Their speed and omnipresence make them extremely well suited to quickly launching ideas, responding to others, or adapting existing work and reusing it. A new generation of artists uses platforms like YouTube to simultaneously work with others and create new works on the spot.

This "video magazine" predated the Internet proper and also, largely, the existence of film and video in the gallery; for that reason, its curatorial conceits seem as alien, and as alluring, as the surface patina of its analogue technologies.

Yesterday at an event at the Guggenheim Museum in New
York, the top videos for YouTube Play were announced. The videos comprise the ultimate YouTube playlist: a
selection of the most unique, innovative, groundbreaking video work being
created and distributed online during the past two years.

On October 21, the top videos selected by the YouTube Play jury will be revealed and celebrated at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The videos will be presented at the Guggenheim Museums in New York, Bilbao, Berlin, and Venice from October 22–24, 2010.